Tag: book

Inside Azure Management v4 – Chapter 2: Implementing Governance in Azure

These are challenging times for the whole world but to stay true to ourselves we are preparing for the release of the 4th edition of Inside Azure Management book. We expect to be ready no later than 15th of May but as you can understand many of us are busy supporting our customers from home. The book as always will be free download but of course you will be able to purchase it via Amazon as well if you want to. Return to this blog post in a few days to check for the Amazon link. We have worked hard to update the content to the latest changes inside Azure but also to give you some new scenarios.

Continue reading “Inside Azure Management v4 – Chapter 2: Implementing Governance in Azure” →

Free ebook: Microsoft System Center: Optimizing Service Manager

Another free System Center book is available. Grab it here.

Free ebook: Introducing Microsoft System Center 2012 R2

New free book is available for the System Center community. Download as free download here.

Book Review: System Center 2012 Orchestrator Unleashed

I’ve been waiting for this book for a long time and when I finally got it can fairly say it is worth it. Two of the authors I had pleaser to meet in person – Pete Zerger and Anders Bengtsson. If you have a chance to be on a event where they have presentation do not hesitate to attend it, it is a must see. The other three authors are also well known in the community – Kerrie Meyler, Marcus Oh and Kurt Van Hoecke. So when you join the powers of these five great experts you get great book about Orchestrator.

I will not go into details but the book will explain you in very understanding way the concept of Orchestrator. Once you are done with the concept you will learn how to install it and implement it which will help you to design Orchestrator implementations for a real world scenarios. Also in this part you will learn how to make runbooks and how you can achieve the same goal in many ways and most important how to improve your runbooks. The last part covers integration with the other System Center components. In this part the focus in showing you examples on how to accomplish certain scenarios and explaining how the runbooks for these scenarios were created and the logic behind them.

As a summary the best part of the book is that in every chapter there are tips from the field that will learn you for the best practices not only about Orchestrator and runbooks but also for orchestration, automation and integration as concepts. If you are looking for a source to learn Orchestrator I recommend you this book:

Book Review: Microsoft System Center 2012 Orchestrator Cookbook

I am having the chance to review another Packt Publishing book about System Center component. As you can see from the post title this book will help you get started in the Orchestrator world. Authors of the book three very well know community members – Samuel Erskine (MCT), Andreas Baumgarten (MVP) and Steven Beaumont.

The book consists of 9 chapters which total 318 pages. The first two chapters deal with installing and designing Orchestrator. From them you will learn the architecture of Orchestrator, how to install it and how to plan Orchestrator for high availability. The third chapters takes to the heart of Orchestrator – the runbooks. Not only you will understand what is runbook but also you will learn how to plan them, document them and make them. Planning and documenting runbooks is significant part of creating them so this is important chapter. Next five chapters cover five different integration packs – Active Directory IP, Configuration Manager IP, Operations Manager IP, Virtual Machine Manager IP and Service Manager IP. These five IPs are probably the most used one also and definitely one of the first tasks that you will want to automate will be related to them. The good part about these chapters is that they provide very detailed steps on how to create more than a dozen runbooks covering different scenarios. You can use the instruction to create these runbooks in your lab environment by using minimum resources. The runbook examples are very close to real scenarios because not only the activities in the integration packs are used but also PowerShell. In real world PowerShell is leveraged a lot for accomplishing more advanced tasks. In the last 9th chapter are covered some advanced techniques like child runbooks, error handling, logging and looping.

As summary if you would like to learn Orchestrator this book is definitely a source for learning that you should consider. It will give you the initial knowledge and the advanced one you can have with creating more and more runbooks. If you like the book you can find it in one of these stored: